NATIONAL LEAGUE OF CITIES (NLC)
Introduction: Why Is Equity Important?
“Equity is just and fair inclusion into a society in which all can participate, prosper and reach their full potential.” -POLICYLINK
Cities Are Shaping the Story of America
The success we have seen in our nation’s cities is clear, but the future of our urban places will be defined by how we work together to lift all members of our communities in the future. Great places don’t rise from a blank slate — they use unique assets to build up what’s special about the community, rather than seeking to recreate success from elsewhere. As cities continue to grow, equity and inclusion will be ever-more pressing.
While many cities feel the immediate positive outcomes from wealth flooding into metropolitan regions, they also feel the negative impact on community members of varying income levels – particularly, those at the bottom that face increased housing prices, greater need for social services and growing concern for community safety. The income inequality and wealth gaps are at outsized levels, with the richest 0.1 percent holding the same amount of wealth as the bottom 90 percent. And when examined through a racial equity lens, the disparities become even starker; on average, white families have six times the wealth of African American and Hispanic families. This is where we are now. Unfortunately, the current policy environment at the national level isn’t focused on alleviating these inequities—cities are.
It is clear that our nation’s cities cannot only be defined by the growth of the tech and the creative sectors. Instead, we must act deliberatively for growth of any kind to be truly sustainable. As the tide of innovation in cities rises, local leaders must work assiduously to lift all boats by planning for inclusive economic development.
The National League of Cities (NLC) seeks to help city leaders lead. Our annual State of the Cities research analyzes the key issues that matter to mayors and cities. For a number of years now the top issues that matter are: economic development, infrastructure, and public safety. The Future of Equity in Cities seeks to take these core issues and forecast the opportunities and challenges to come in cities not just today, but in the decades to come through an analysis of long-range planning, an examination of on-the-ground programming of inclusive economic growth, and by seeking to better understand the public safety challenges that cities will face far into the future.
Infrastructure – autonomous vehicles, road pricing and more
Mobility is critical to humanity’s growth in the urban environment. It is one of the major facilitators of human settlement and success. Where an individual goes, how they get there, and the resources they have access to have the potential to influence nearly every other element of their lives. As mobility and adequate infrastructure have become more widely regarded as civil rights, central to inclusion and critical to individuals’ capacity to participate and prosper in the modern-day economy, they have simultaneously been impacted by the rise of technological forces.
New technology is promising a hyperconnected future for cities in which driverless cars and smart city applications have the potential to improve services, efficiency and quality of life. We can imagine a not too distant future in which every consumer product and piece of infrastructure increasingly has the ability to sense surrounding stimuli, to communicate with other devices and people, and to draw on the computing and storage power of the cloud. However, along with all of these exciting advances come a bevy of new questions about equity. With current demographic shifts, generational preferences, wealth creation and other factors pointing toward the continued growth of cities, the importance of mobility and infrastructure is ever-present. The recognition that equity is driven and sustained by these forces presses city officials to ask new questions and prepare for a new future.
Economic development – equitable growth
Cities are becoming more diverse, but simultaneously more segregated and inequitable. Ninety-eight percent of growth in the one hundred largest cities since 2000 was from growth in minority populations. A Brookings Institution analysis of the 2011- 2015 American Community Survey found that despite this increased diversity in cities, racial segregation has only moderately declined. Dominantly white neighborhoods in cities were 79 percent white in 2000 and 72 percent white in 2015, despite the overall white population in cities having dropped from 64 percent to 56 percent during the same period. For neighborhoods outside of large metropolitan areas, this reduction was even smaller, from 84 percent to 80 percent.
As a nation, higher birth rates for racial minorities are projected to make the aggregate minority population a majority of the country by 2043. In the majority of cities, the fastest growing employment sectors are high-skill and high wage, but unfortunately these sectors are not likely to add the same number of aggregate jobs as much larger and lower-skilled sectors like retail, food service, and office and administration. This spatial mismatch of employment and wages will only be amplified by future growth trends in cities and will reinforce inequities. It is imperative that cities work to counteract these trends now.
Public safety – predictive policing, community engagement
As urban populations become more diverse, so are police departments. Police departments are becoming more representative of the populations they protect. Many cities are recognizing that prioritizing equity and diversity in making hiring decisions for public safety agencies is critical to establishing trust between citizens and the officers that serve them. In addition to becoming more representative of their communities, more police departments are also adopting the tenets of community policing in their mission statements, with nearly 70 percent of departments emphasizing community policing values as of 2013. Public safety agencies are also more frequently establishing problem-solving partnerships with local organizations that address specific challenges in their communities. These trends highlight a positive shift in police force composition and policing tactics toward approaches that focus on community trust, outreach, and cooperation.
Additionally, like cities, public safety institutions are moving toward data-driven applications. Increasingly, smart cities use data analytics to increase efficiency and transparency, developing metrics with which to measure municipal operations. As this trend accelerates nationwide, police departments are adapting and learning from prior successes, developing their own crime metrics and using data analytics to forecast crime. Concepts like predictive policing and other data-driven public safety strategies will continue to attract debate, as they often rely on prior causal relationships between environments and past offenses. With such significant changes in how policing is administered in our cities, we must be cognizant of the nuances between communities and neighborhoods, and ensure a focus on equity is at the core of all public safety decision-making.
Cities are partnering more with the private sector, nonprofits and other intersectional partners in order to best approach these oncoming challenges. Only by working together can we effectively seize the opportunities to come. This is the century of the city and urbanity is the future of humanity. The future of cities is not something that can be predicted by simply looking into a crystal ball and pronouncing what will be next. Only through rigorous analysis of existing trends, working with city leaders and national experts, and forecasting what will impact cities can we collectively succeed—this report seeks to provide city leaders with a cogent analysis of what the future of cities will hold.
Download full version (PDF): The Future of Equity in Cities
About the National League of Cities (NLC)
www.nlc.org
Today, more than 1,600 cities, towns, and villages of all sizes are NLC members and another 18,000 communities participate through their state municipal leagues. Local elected leaders from even the smallest cities now have an opportunity to shape the priorities, policies, and advocacy positions of the organization. With the door to leadership and participation open to all local elected officials, NLC is now as diverse as the communities it serves.
Tags: cities, equity in cities, National League of Cities, NLC, urban
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